Kalyani Puthenpurayil
El Estoque
Monta Vista High School, Cupertino, CA
NSPA Marketer of the Year Portfolio
About Kalyani
Kalyani is a junior and served as a sports editor during the 2022-23 school year and will be serving as a co-Editor-in-Chief during the 2023-24 school year for El Estoque, Monta Vista High School's newsmagazine.
Social Media
El Estoque utilizes Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to promote its content and connect with an online audience. Our largest following base is on Instagram, where we have 1,800 followers, a 300 follower increase from the previous year's 1,500. We post a wide variety of content — photos of local, school and sports events (both home and away), promotions of website content and magazines and fun reels in which reporters interview students on the street about anything, from how they are feeling during College Application season to their NBA finals predictions.
Out of all the posts on Instagram, 81% is photojournalism, 10% is promotions and 9% is other. The "other" category includes monthly Arts and Entertainment media recaps and local news recaps. After analyzing the insights, I realized that there was an area where our publication had potential — Reels. In the past year, the top three posts that reached the highest number of accounts were all reels. The first place reel is a Man on the Street video, the second place reel is a promotion of El Estoque's October 2022 magazine and the third is a reel of photos of a bubble-blowing activity the Monta Vista High School Leadership held.
To unlock this potential, I directed staffers to create Reels to promote the videos they create for El Estoque's YouTube channel and created a template for it as well, to maintain consistency. This drew a lot more views to video stories that were promoted using this method, with a video about Earth and Arbor day going from just 30 views to 112 views after the Reel was posted on Instagram (the Reel reached 980 accounts, received 1963 plays and 110 likes).
I also created a promotion reel for a collection of stories — a package — that the Sports section had created in the magazine, and paired it with a reel to increase viewership, as most of our magazines are distributed at our school only and I wanted to bring attention to the same content on the website as well. The reel reached 794 accounts and received over 1677 plays. This helped the three stories in the package receive a total of 308 views.
Another thing I noticed was that our publication posts heavily on Instagram, sometimes posting several posts on one day. This can deteriorate the reach of each post since viewers can feel overwhelmed if multiple El Estoque posts show up on their feed everyday, which can lead them to mute or unfollow us, and in order to combat this, I suggested that certain posts can be posted on Twitter and Facebook instead. As part of the social media team, I play a crucial role in proofreading captions and selecting photos that go on our social media platforms. Since Instagram has a ten-photo limit and Twitter has a four-photo limit, I suggested that posts with five or more stronger photos should go on Instagram while posts that do not have that could be posted on Twitter instead. This allowed for more impressions for our content on Twitter, with over 2,000 during April.
Staff members send 4 to 10 photos and a caption to members of the social media team. When I receive a post, I send it to the social media channel, implement the edits others have and post it in a timely fashion.
Lastly, another measure of a post's success is if those who are featured in the post repost it on their stories. While this may not be possible for all posts, such as for a sports post where the team lost, it can help our publication directly connect with members of the audience and tap into a different audience as well if the post is shared several times. In order to attain this, I always make sure to spend approximately an hour looking through my photos to find the best and then edit them with Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop.
Sophomore Maya Pullara (left) shared a post featuring her from Drama's spring showcase"Illuminate." Posts about different organizations and clubs can create conversations within those clubs and give them a sense of unity.
Garden Club, which was featured in a video called "Behind the Blossoms," reposted this promotion reel. The reel highlights the quality of the reporters' camerawork, further bringing more viewers to the video.
Photojournalism
Serving El Estoque as a Sports editor in the past year,
I was in charge of managing a spreadsheet that allowed staff members to sign up for games in order to cover them on social media and to keep them accountable. As a Sports editor, it was my job to ensure not only that there was enough sports coverage, but also that a wide variety of sports were being covered. I attended games of sports that were rarely covered in the past, such as softball, badminton and color guard. By motivating staff members to attend games of sports that lacked attendance, during second semester, the most liked sports post was the Winter Guard's “The Moment We Never Met" performance, with 315 likes and 1,262 accounts reached.
I updated who would do a post and game review, and ensured that they posted it within three days of the event. The green indicates a successful post, a yellow indicates an issue that prevented the post from being completed and the red indicates a post or story not being completed, and in response, I gave them a 'strike' (after two strikes, they wouldn't be able to cover any games).
As a Sports editor, I was an avid user of Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop in order to edit my photos, however, I realized that not all members on staff were utilizing those tools. I recommended staffers to use Lightroom to edit their photos and helped those who were new to it. I also made a presentation for Photoshop and presented it to our class in hopes to make what initially seems as a daunting tool to be more approachable.
Our posts on both Instagram and Facebook largely consist of photojournalism, and sports photos made up approximately 43% of the photojournalistic posts this year. This year, under my leadership, our publication posted 91 sports posts, compared to the 64 sports posts from last year.
Advertising
On El Estoque, members are given advertising contracts in the beginning of year, as raising money will allow us to purchase more equipment and help fund our content. I led by example by meeting up with businesses, especially those that I had already established connections with due to a past involvement in them, and by highlighting our 115,000+ page views and 19,000+ unique users each month, I sold advertisements for our magazine and website — in total, our publication made approximately $6,500 in advertising, with eight different businesses and professionals.
Promoting El Estoque
Our school added a mandatory class for freshmen, reducing the amount of electives that they are able to take and the prospective that a Writing for Publications course, which serves as an optional prerequisite for the Journalism pathway, will likely have a drastic reduction in interest could endanger our program. In order to combat that, I reached out to teachers at Kennedy Middle School, whose graduates make up a majority of the freshmen population at MVHS, and presented about how middle schoolers can enter the Journalism pathway and what they could get out of it, from skills to the community, drawing from my personal experience to establish a connection.
Additionally, our school also held a course selection night, which I actively participated in and I promoted our journalism program. By promoting our prerequisite class, the students entering El Estoque will already be well-versed in Journalism, and it helps to ensure utmost quality in our works. However, since it is not an absolute requirement, I had to customize how I marketed the class to the students depending on what grade the student was in. I suggested incoming freshmen and sophomores to take Writing for Publications, and incoming juniors and seniors to directly apply to El Estoque. This allowed for a booming interest in our program, and in the following year, we will have one course of Writing for Publications and a larger El Estoque staff than ever before — 73 students are enrolled in both the Journalism and Multimedia Design courses combined.